1/19/2011

Obama will never sign it, of course. But I have argued that it’s good politics to get people on the record. Hot Air has the breakdown of today’s vote (just three Democrats voting for repeal) together with an explanation of how Republicans could try to force a Senate vote.

Even without a Senate vote, every Senator will be asked their position. That’s progress right there.

But I’d like a vote.

I’ll end as the Hot Air post does: with this video of Paul Ryan talking about ObamaCare’s fiscal impact. Good stuff.

If you want to get into hateful rhetoric, there is one group of Americans the left regularly dehumanizes. They literally declare they are not persons, that they are not alive, that they have no rights that the rest of us are bound to respect. Indeed, our own president fought against efforts to declare that the killing of one of these Americans to be murder.

Of course, I am speaking of the unborn. And can there be any doubt that the callous disregard for human life led to this?

For those who can’t watch, here’s the story in print. The short version is that his doctor allegedly ran a massively unsafe abortion clinic, involving dirty equipment giving patients infections, causing by some means one adult patient. Further in seven cases he induced the birth of viable fetuses and then committed infanticide.

And yes, the left has said all of those awful things about fetuses. Indeed, the Supreme Court itself has contributed much to that rhetoric in Roe v. Wade. First, they admitted that if the fetus was a person it was fatal to the right to an abortion:

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Now, let me start by saying that I am not a birther. Indeed, given that this would put Joe Biden into the presidency, I am not even sure I would want the birther theory to be true.

Still, for Neil Abercrombie, as the new Governor of Hawaii, it was his self-declared mission to finally put this to rest:

“It’s an insult to his mother and father,” he told KGMB. “How would anybody like to have their mother and father in that kind of a situation? I was friends with his mom and dad.”

“It’s a matter of principle with me… I was here when he was born,” he told CNN.

“His father was one of the first scholarship students coming to the United States and he came to the University of Hawaii, which we were very proud (of),” the governor added. “We became good friends.”

Hey, good for him. Although this is poorly stated:

“This has to do with the people in Hawaii who love him, people who loved his mom and dad. This has to do with the respect of the office that the president is entitled to,” Abercrombie told CBS affiliate KGMB over the weekend.

Um, the correct words are not “entitled to” but “eligible for.” No one is entitled to be President. But then, maybe he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Anyway, so Mr. Abercrombie, how’s it going?

Q: You stirred up quite a controversy with your comments regarding birthers and your plans to release more information regarding President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. How is that coming?

A: I got a letter from someone the other day who was genuinely concerned about it; it is not all just political agenda. They were talking on Olelo last night about this; it has a political implication for 2012 that we simply cannot have.

(Abercrombie said there is a recording of the birth in the State Archives and he wants to use that.)

It was actually written I am told, this is what our investigation is showing, it actually exists in the archives, written down …

…What I can do, and all I have ever said, is that I am going to see to it as governor that I can verify to anyone who is honest about it that this is the case.

If there is a political agenda then there is nothing I can do about that, nor can the president.

So in other words, no birth certificate?

Like I said, I don’t think there is any reasonable doubt that Obama was born in America, specifically Hawaii. Birth announcements at the time constitute powerful evidence to that fact. But if you are going to rebut the birthers, releasing the original is the least you can do.

Finally, to anyone who argues that Obama is not a natural born citizen please do not waste my time with theories that because Obama was the son of a Kenyan that somehow British law could deprive a man of his birthright as a natural born citizen. The founders did not rebel against England in order to allow England to decide who was and was not a citizen of this country.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Okay, did I slip into some kind of alternate universe, or did a Huffington Post columnist write something discussing the right to bear arms that wasn’t clearly pro or con and was actually kind of interesting? Adam Winkler takes on the issue of Dr. King and the right to bear arms, and there is a lot to love on both the anti- and pro- side of things. For instance on the pro- side of it:

Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.

William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal.”

As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King’s house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.

Master of civility Eric Fuller, last seen threatening death to a Tea Party leader, wanted to torture and sever the ears of Sarah Palin, Limbaugh, and others.

“There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with [Minnesota US Rep.] Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin’s ears toward the end, because they’re small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney’s, in the center,” Fuller said.

Who do you figure Fuller’s favorite radio hosts are? Who inspires this hatred against Palin, Limbaugh, and Cheney? As the media likes to say: “I don’t know, but . . .”

. . . but we have nationally syndicated radio host Mike Malloy, who has, since the Giffords shooting, been steadily wishing for Rush Limbaugh’s death, and labeling Dick Cheney a mass killer. Via Radio Equalizer:

(The clip continues with Randi Rhodes: “Glenn Beck has now become Sesame Street for potential assassins.” More Malloy, from Radio Equalizer:

Quote:

The rhetoric that comes from me is the rhetoric of rage…and, um, have their been violent images? Of course. Rush Limbaugh choking on his throat fat – that you know, to me, that is not a threat – I can’t – I wish I could, but I can’t reach into his throat and jiggle up his throat fat so he suffocates – I can’t do it.

He goes on to label Dick Cheney a “mass killer.”

Have Republicans learned anything from our civil friends on the left? No: they are still going forward with a vote on repealing the “Job Killing” ObamaCare.

If Republicans continue with that talk, they’re going to get someone killed!

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Let me start by saying I don’t make many product endorsements and I am not being compensated in any way to say this. I paid for the product I am about to discuss and now I am glad I did. You see, yesterday when I got up my neighborhood was an ice rink. There was about a quarter to half an inch of ice all over everything—the sidewalks, the grass, the roads and the car.

Now a few months before, I purchased a pair of these things called “Snow Trax.” Here’s an image:

They are basically ice cleats that slip onto your shoes like rubbers or galoshes. And they worked perfectly. As long as they were on my feet I never slipped on the ice.

Of course that was the big caveat: “As long as they were on my feet.” When I first went out there I wore my semi-serious snow boots. The sole of the boots were so thick that it had trouble reaching to grip on the boot and as a result it kept slipping off. When I put it on my normal work shoes, it wasn’t such a problem. Still when you use them, pay attention to them. Once they slipped off without me noticing and then I almost slipped and fell thinking I had traction.

This works great where I am, where you can expect a pretty decent amount of snowfall and the like each winter, but not typically massive and constant snow. So if you live in Texas, its probably a waste of money because you will be lucky to use it once every ten years and by then you won’t know where it is if that storm finally happens. And if you live in Alaska, you should probably invest in a much more serious ice cleat set up. But where I live (Northern Virginia), it makes perfect sense. I will be keeping one pair in my car and another in my house from now on.

Anyway, if you are a member of Costco, you can buy a pair here. It comes out to ten dollars a pair, very much worth it.

And you can also find it on numerous other sites, just search for the name.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Yesterday, I derided Obama’s new “smart regulation” initiative, arguing that like a lot of the things Obama says, they sound great in theory but end up stinking in reality. I pointed out, for instance, his desire to impose new infection control standards on hospitals was an example of onerous, overly rigid regulation that purported to “solve” a problem that no one could even prove existed. After all this was not a choice between the big daddy federal regulators and no controls at all. Even in the absence of state regulation, every state had a system of liability to punish professionals and institutions that engaged in malpractice which, if anything, was too stringent (see, e.g. the entire legal career of John Edwards).

So what does Obama see as an example of an excessive regulation needing repeal? The example he offers is the inclusion of the sweetener saccharin in the category of hazardous waste. Really? Saccharin as hazardous waste? Amid dozens of high-stakes, much-studied regulatory controversies, the only one he could come up with is one that — with all due respect to the people who make the little pink packets — is of hardly any significance to the wider economy, and not much more as a matter of principle?

Even this administration could have made better deregulatory boasts than that. For example, in a fit of sense, the Obama Justice Department a while back adopted regulations specifying that the Americans with Disabilities Act should no longer (as of this March) be interpreted to require restaurants, theaters and other Main Street businesses to admit patrons’ non-canine “service animals” such as monkeys, goats, snakes and spiders.

But it was almost as if his point was to pick a regulation so minor that no one cared much about it one way or the other. Had the President’s speechwriters been looking for an example of a hazardous-substance rule that would actually get people talking about regulatory overreach, they might have picked EPA’s dairy-spill regulations, which (in the words of one report) “treat spilled milk like oil, requiring farmers to build extra storage tanks and form emergency spill plans….” That one does have big and widespread economic costs.

Whoops — not a good example. That one’s not being repealed — EPA at last report intended to go forward with it. Can we really assume anything much is changing here besides the atmospherics?

And indeed I think I have mentioned in the comments on this site the ridiculousness of the EPA regulations. William Jacobson talked about this months ago and the logic goes like this. There are some natural oils in milk. So the EPA declared that milk is oil, and as a result dairy farmers had to take on onerous safety measures to prevent… spills. Jesus wept, that is so stupid.

And to further deepen our analysis, it turns out that those regulations regarding Saccharin actually didn’t amount to much, according to Rena Steinzor:

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